I’m not impressed by 3D on the home screen. I find it to be too gimmicky to really be viable long term. The simple fact of the matter is, I don’t want to watch TV with another pair of glasses on. Besides personal comfort, 3D with glasses adds more costs to my home viewing experience. Each pair can cost anywhere from $20 (for the cheapest of the cheap) all the way up to $199 each.

active 3D lenses, battery powered with a button cell

Do the math for your setup. If you have friends coming over you’re looking at 4-8 pairs of glasses. Unless your one of those BYOB hosts, then you’ll probably be funding the lenses for everyone. The costs can quickly add up to a cheap LCD panel (or even a semi-decent one).

What about the ones without special glasses?

3D screen technology without the use of special glasses

At CES, we saw our fair share of such 3D technology. In general, the experiences were pretty bad. Several companies had these types of no glasses setups, but you really had to be in a certain spot and tilt your head a certain way and wait for the light to catch it and then you caught a glimpse of the 3D image. If you moved your head or walked in front of the screen while watching it, you could see the warping effect on the screen that almost made the picture jump every other frame.

To say it was bad is being complimentary, it really was like watching one of those toy TVs with wind up motion. You know, one of these?

We’ve mentioned before that 3D was all over the place. It’s clear that the movie makers, TV makers (like Sony, LG, Samsung, etc), game companies, and a lot of other folks at CES want 3D to work. So much so, they’re going to shove it down our throats and like the lemmings that we all are, we’re going to buy it and in spades.

Folks are investing tons of money in cameras, movies, converting 2D content into 3D, news sets, and advertising to sell you on a new set today.

3D Camera on display

Afterall, this is all a business, a really really big, approaching multi-trillion dollar, industry.

Understand why folks are promoting this technology. It’s really more simple than everyone makes it out to be. The truth? They make money. By pushing new more expensive sets, they’re going to make money. By offering a new class of products, they’re going to make money. It’s how the industry works. So 3D is the next best hope at delivering more returns on shareholder value.

It’s not about us the average consumer, but about what we as consumers are willing to pay for.

Is 3D truly innovative, new and exciting? I don’t know about exciting as it’s purely your opinion. New? No, not really. It’s been around for a while and the technology just isn’t all that new. Is it innovative? In my opinion, no, not really. Innovative to me would be something that truly shakes the mold and not something all the other folks are doing, which is 3D.

You want my definition of innovative? Look at what Sharp is doing by adding yellow to the RGB mix. That’s innovative. Simple, but innovative.

Look, 3D might be cool and it might be exciting, but the results that set makers are having today with pulling it off(even from the same 3D content source like DirecTV, or blu-ray disc) hadsome seriously mixed results based upon what we looked at. Some were great, some felt like parallaxed TV, and others just had a fuzzy image or a jumpy picture at times.

It’s not a standardized execution by any means like decoding HD on your set. When you go to buy an HD set, you know it meets a certain standard and it can do certain things and will look a certain way. I take that back, even in buying an HD set folks are going to have preferences on color saturation, contrast ratios, and all that good stuff. For 3D the whole picture gets even more blurry (that’s just laziness on my part).

To me it just boils down to a few simple questions:

• What do I want out of my TV set?
• Do I want to go on a movie studio ride with a pair of glasses every time I watch movies at home?
• Will my kids put the glasses on long enough to make it worthwhile? (or will they just destroy the glasses?)
• How much more is this going to make my setup?
• Am I better off investing in 3D glasses or putting that money into improved sound?

There’s a lot there to find out and of course personal preference always plays an important role in how those questions get answered.

For me, it’s about ranking those questions and answering the most important one first.

So, the answer is better sound. Sound, makes the picture bigger and better. You can watch a movie at home on a 42″ screen with crappy sound, you won’t remember much. Kick it up to discrete 5.1 or go 10.1 and you’ve got room filling, mind blowing sound. You’ll remember the experience because sound is something you hear and feel.

3D is great at Disney World or at the movies. At home, it’s an experience that just isn’t ready.

(Unless of course you got the duckets, in which case why are you reading this blog anyways?)

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